The proposed thing looks fine to me, I don't care so much about how it looks, what colours it uses, etc., just the reorganization that puts the old crusty docs on the shelf where they belong.

dougeff wrote:

perhaps as Titles "Wiki", " Forum" (as a graphic)

I would suggest real text instead of graphics for most things though, because text is auto-translatable, searchable, audio-readable, etc. --there's a lot of usability you lose if you replace text with a graphic. (The existing site emblem seems fine though, since there's not really important textual information in it anyway.)

Is it spelled 'colour' in Canada? I thought that was a British thing. Also, I like it dark-blue. I would also like it off-white or gray, probably. Just not pink or lime green or magenta. I remember the old days of the internet... Everything was black backgrounds and white text. I do think bright white is hard on the eyes.

You know what would be super f-n awesome... if the main page was a playable JavaScript game, with 8-bit graphics. I'm thinking space invaders shooting at the Nesdev logo. Probably won't happen, but a boy can dream.

_________________nesdoug.com -- blog/tutorial on programming for the NES

The reason is, presumably, to make it feel more NES-like, since I...can't actually think of any light-BG menus on the NES.

The Tetris 2 title screen is the first one I thought of. Also RHDE Shop/Stock screens and Action 53 and 240p test suite activity selection, but I'm biased.

In any case, I'm putting up my prototype today, as it already appears to be an improvement in at least one way. If you have design suggestions, link your HTML mockup and we might see what can be included.

I think perhaps sometimes I feel like I need to be (too) vocal on matters like these because I'm one of the few people here without a programming background and I'd just like to make sure an outsider's opinion gets voiced on matters almost entirely concerning new, prospective users. That, and I feel like people judge websites very quickly these days.

tepples wrote:

If you have design suggestions, link your HTML mockup and we might see what can be included.

Yeah it would definitely be an improvement in my opinion. I started messing around with it a little last night. Just some really minor stuff. I made the boxes the same heights, I changed the fonts and the colors.

The colors are subjective of course and I don't even know if I'm crazy about the ones that I picked. But I'm willing to make some revised comps with different color/font combinations if anyone has any suggestions.

Edit: removed example link

Last edited by darryl.revok on Tue May 31, 2016 12:56 am, edited 1 time in total.

I'll get to that when I think of a good CSS solution. Margin in CSS is sort of finicky.

But anyway, I've been looking into usability of this site. If a site is not usable on mobile devices, Google will demote it in results from searches that are performed on mobile devices. I worry that Google is demoting our site for not being mobile-friendly.

By default, web browsers for mobile phones assume that the page is formatted for a 980px-wide viewport, lay it out for such a window, and zoom it out to the screen's width. This usually produces unreadably small text. A website can override this assumption by placing the following element inside its <head> element:

Code:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">

This reduces the viewport width to the width of the device, usually 320px to 480px wide for a phone, or bigger for a tablet. (In CSS, 1px is not a pixel but instead roughly 1/2700 of the distance from the eye to the display.) And at this viewport width, the browser doesn't need to zoom out, which causes text to be readable.

Another common problem is making links too small and putting them too close together. With the demise of the stylus everywhere but on Nintendo devices and Galaxy Note phones, input on mobile devices usually means a finger. Links too close together (less than about 40px) may cause the browser to have to zoom in to confirm which link was intended, or they may cause the user to activate the wrong link.

The front page of the site is mobile-friendly. The page has a viewport tag, which causes the browser to give text a readable size, and links are big. It also has a media query breakpoint, so that it'll put one "button" across the width of the page instead of two if the viewport is not wide enough for two.

The archive is also mobile-friendly now that I have added the viewport tag as well as a CSS rule that adds some margin above and below <li> elements to push links farther apart. But the "Site Index" at the top will need a redesign to use <li> instead of <br> to separate items. It has been suggested to move the archive to a page on the wiki, with an available prototype.

In my opinion, many user interface design techniques to convey information on a phone's small screen are also useful to convey information in the 224x192 usable pixels in the safe area of the NES picture.

I understand your concerns but.. How many active nes developing community exist? To my knowledge, and I could be wrong, nesdev is the only one. I'm sure by searching you would find it eventually or from other sites linking to it.

It's feel more like the google "thugs" wanting you to do things their way. I don't see the point. If you can update it with a simple non time consuming update then fine, let's do it. If not, not worth it.

I don't think it's an issue of competing with other sites, but rather in competing for the limited patience a potential beginner has.

I can totally empathize with someone who gets overwhelmed and discouraged when they go looking for information on a topic, and the information is not well curated and is not presented in an easy way to understand. When every other word is something you don't know, it can be easy to not see a place to begin.

Best case scenario if a newbie finds a bad site, is that they try it, and then eventually come here and we have to take time to sort them out.

Worst case scenario is that they just give up because what they find is confusing, or misleading.

If I search for "NES Development", the first three results are NESdev. That's good. After that is the Bob Rost document which is terribly outdated.

I think it's a lot to expect someone without familiarity to search "NES Development" though. "NES Programming" turns up this first: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/NES_Programming Not much there. I didn't read to confirm accuracy. Probably largely a dead-end though to make a game if someone doesn't come in equipped with a lot of the fundamental logic. Then there's one NESdev link, and "Programming that 8-bit beast of power, the NES", which is hosted here, but outdated, right?

"Making an NES game" doesn't give any NESdev results. Same with "How to make an NES game", "creating game for NES", or "design NES game".

Would it be possible to target some of the potential "newbie" search phrases?

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest

You cannot post new topics in this forumYou cannot reply to topics in this forumYou cannot edit your posts in this forumYou cannot delete your posts in this forumYou cannot post attachments in this forum